The «drone war» – does it fight terrorism or create it?

Since the terror attacks on September 11 2001, the United States has been fighting terrorist groups in countries like Afghanistan. However, after two catastrophic ground invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has found a new way of fighting: drones.

What are drones?

Drones are airplanes without pilots, radio-controlled from far away using advanced technology like GPS. The drone operators sit in «offices» in the USA and bomb targets thousands of miles away, mostly in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. This means the USA can now kill terrorists without risking American lives. That sounds like a good way to fight terrorism, right? Not everyone thinks so.

The arguments for using drones to kill terrorists

The people who support using drones believe that the alternative would be to use soldiers on the ground to hunt the terrorists. The USA has already done that twice, once in Afghanistan and once in Iraq. Both those invasions were extremely expensive and killed a lot of people. Most of those who were killed were Afghans and Iraqis, but many were also American military personnel, about 4500 for Iraq and 2300 for Afghanistan, according to Wikipedia.

Drones, on the other hand, kill very few people. Normally they only kill the terrorist and sometimes some people who were close to where the bomb fell. And the best thing about them: American soldiers never get killed, they are completely safe.

We must also remember that the terrorists are really nasty people who are planning terror attacks against innocent people in the US and other countries. The terror group called al-Qaida is much less powerful that it used to be, thanks to drones.

The arguments against using drones to kill terrorists

Many military experts believe that drones create more terrorists than they kill. If your brother, cousin, friend or father has been killed by a drone strike, you will be angry at the United States. It’s human. Several times, innocent people have also been by killed by mistake. In countries where the US has used drones, many people now hate the USA so much they want to join terrorist groups, because these groups fight against the USA and the West. .

The drones kill people who are suspected of being terrorists. Normally, if you are suspected of a crime, you should be arrested, put on trial, and then maybe punished. Other criminals, like murderers, cannot be shot on the street just because the police THINK they are murderers. Killing people like this, even terrorists, is against human rights.

The informers – people who give information about where terrorists are – often give wrong information because they want to see their personal enemy get killed.

Many people also believe that using drones is «too easy», because no Americans get killed, and so the USA uses drones too much.